Marija Bursać (; 2 August 192023 September 1943) was a member of the Yugoslav Partisans during World War II in Yugoslavia and the first woman proclaimed a People's Hero of Yugoslavia. Bursać was born to a Bosnian Serb farming family in the village of Kamenica, near Drvar. After the invasion of Yugoslavia by the Axis powers and their creation of the Independent State of Croatia in April 1941, Bursać supported the Partisan resistance movement led by the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). Like other women in her village, she collected food, clothing, and other supplies for the Partisan war effort. Bursać became a member of the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia in September 1941. The following August she was appointed political commissar of a company of the 1st Krajina Agricultural Shock Brigade, which harvested crops in the Sanica River valley, and was admitted to the KPJ at the end of that summer. Bursać became a Partisan in February 1943, joining the newly formed 10th Krajina Brigade. With the brigade, she fought in the Bosansko Grahovo, Knin, Vrlika and Livno areas and served as a nurse. In September 1943, Bursać was wounded in the leg while throwing hand grenades during an attack on the German base at Prkosi in northwestern Bosnia. As she was being transported to a field hospital at Vidovo Selo, she sang Partisan songs. Bursać's wound soon developed gangrene, and she died at the hospital on 23 September 1943. She was proclaimed a People's Hero of Yugoslavia the following month. Schools, streets and organisations were named in her memory following the war, commemorating her service to the Partisan cause. Early life Bursać was born on 2 August 1920 in the village of Kamenica, near Drvar in the region of Bosanska Krajina, the north-western sector of Bosnia and Herzegovina (then part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed as Yugoslavia in 1929). The Drvar area was inhabited primarily by ethnic Serbs, with Bosnian Muslims and Croats forming less than four percent of the population. Bursać was the oldest of five children of stonemason Nikola Bursać and his wife, Joka, who mostly raised sheep and cattle on their family farm. Like other village girls, Bursać did not go to school—only the boys attended elementary school in Drvar. A shepherdess until age fourteen, she later helped her mother with housekeeping and agricultural work. Bursać became skilled at weaving,